I LOVE finding out about different ways to appreciate the Sun and light in general. Use this forum to post your info or questions about various outside the mainstream ways to appreciate our life giving star!

It's the end of 2018 and time for a summary of the geomagnetic activity recorded during 2018 on my home brew magnetometer here in the North-West of England. I've had a few short 'outages' with one thing or another, so the record is not as complete as I would have liked, with February and December being particularly weak on usable data. Nevertheless, the record does display the various intermittent bursts of activity that occurred throughout the year from holes in the Sun's outer atmosphere (corona) and consequent fast flowing solar wind. Mostly the resulting storms were weak (G1) with an occasional G2, but all of them resulted in aurora.

The data have been plotted as raw 'rate of change' over time, in arbitrary units, together with running average of these data as a means of smoothing.

Noisy power supplies are bad things. They give us more noise in our imaging (USB power) and make our hifi systems sound worse than they should. Now here's one playing havoc with your magnetometer. We got a 'hive' light bulb, and, depending where we plug it in depends on how much it flickered, all down to noisy power.

Noisy power supplies are bad things. They give us more noise in our imaging (USB power) and make our hifi systems sound worse than they should. Now here's one playing havoc with your magnetometer. We got a 'hive' light bulb, and, depending where we plug it in depends on how much it flickered, all down to noisy power.